Mannequin Challenge ft. Black Friday sale promotion

Two years ago, The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge took the Internet by storm as videos of celebrities dropping buckets of ice on themselves to raise money to promote awareness of the disease, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, went viral on social media.Not long after that, it was the Harlem Shake, and now, a new king has claimed the proverbial throne: the Mannequin Challenge.

Believed to have been started by students from Florida, the idea behind the video is to remain frozen in action like mannequin’s while the video is being recorded. The past month has seen various Mannequin Challenge videos going viral sporting the hashtag #MannequinChallenge, with the most common song on the play being ‘Black Beatles’ by Rae Sremmurd.

Office workers have taken the opportunity of this new medium to cast a window into the day-to-day mayhem of their everyday lives, or taking into a step further and documenting unconventional office habits within the work environment for a bit of comic relief.

It’s been posited that the inspiration behind such videos can be found in mainstream outlets like HBO TV and news channels, where it is compared to bullet time scenes from science fiction films, such as The Matrix, X-Men: Days of Future Past, X-Men: Apocalypse, Lost in Space, Buffalo ’66, and a recently-released show called Westworld where robotic hosts can be stopped in their tracks.

The initial posting has inspired works by other groups, especially professional athletes and sports teams that have posted increasingly complex and elaborate videos.

And because we come from a country of unparalleled gusto and enthusiasm, Pakistani groups started joining the cultural movement as well, with store brands like Hush Puppies and Shoe Planet capitalising on the viral nature to promote their own businesses while having a blast.

With Black Friday readily approaching last month, and sales already expected to hit the stores, the brands played smart and piggybacked on the challenge to create a hype and draw in people by the crowds.

Hush Puppies to Shoe Planet managed to catch the chaos that goes on during these sales and froze them in a video, literally.

As we go through the different Mannequin Challenge videos, we can say that so far the Shoe Planet has been the best one in Pakistan.

Why do we say its the best? Because the audience proved that is. The video posted on their Facebook page on 23rd November, just two days before the Black Friday Sale. The video garnered more than 169K views, 311 shares and more than 3.1K likes along with hundreds of comments/conversations on the post itself. It was all about promoting the sale.

Hush Puppies, on the other hand,  gathered around 164K views and 267 shares.

To state the obvious, it was seen that there was not much competition against Shoe Planet. The response received on the video brought massive results for the brand itself.

Shoe Planet recorded the highest number of sales in a day and the highest number of footfall (the number of people entering the shop in the given time).

Being the bigger brand that it is, Shoe Planet’s video as compared to other videos broke the stereotype that women are shopaholics. It was visible in the video that men can be shopaholics too, especially when it comes to shoes. Looks like when it comes to Black Friday sales, it’s not just the women who have cat-fights, men do that too.

The men were caught in action as there was sniffing shoes and snatching going on in their section. It can also be seen that there were more men than women in the Shop Planet video.

Whereas, when we compare it to Hush Puppies video, the number of people in the video is less and the ‘fun element’ is seen missing from their video. Not only that, it seemed more like just another day at the shop.

Black Friday wasn’t just any sale. It was known to be the biggest one of the year and Shoe Planet managed to make full use of the social media trend and used it as a great marketing strategy to set the record this year.

While the Mannequin Challenge is a hoot and half in its own place, we can’t wait for the next viral showdown!

WATCH THE SHOE PLANET MANNEQUIN CHALLENGE HERE